An African in Greenland [Paperback]

Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures among the Inuit is a testament both to the wonderful strangeness of the human species and to the surprising sympathies that bind us all. It has something of Candide, with its intrepid hero practising fearless reverse ethnology. It has something of Kafka’s Amerika, with its love of the inconsequential, and its mixture of sweet reason and surprise. . . . Kpomassie is a writer of enviable and maybe indispensable amiability and serenity. —Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books

Was there ever an odyssey like this one, from the palm forests of Togoland, in Western Africa, to the remote jumble of silence and ice of northern Greenland? It is a long way in miles, but even longer in resilience, adventurous persistence and uncanny charm. . . . Kpomassie’s book contains a catalogue of his impressions, combined with striking passages of fine writing. The result is the curious double perspective of a naïve visitor, combined with the controlled distance of a writer. —Paul Zweig, The New York Times Book Review

Kpomassie is indisputably a man of extraordinary charm; he is also sharp and perceptive and honest—unencumbered by a sense of obligation to his hosts that might have prevented him from telling us what they are really like. His honesty, while occasionally brutal, in the end serves the Greenlanders well: he pays them the compliment of showing them as they are. —Katherine Bouton, The Nation

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